SOPA

An organized crowd of protesters numbering more than a thousand have convened outside the U.S. Capitol in protest of mass surveillance programs by American spy apparatuses. The rally, which was organized by Stop Watching Us, focuses largely on Internet data gathering efforts by the NSA and other agencies. It is supported by Edward Snowden, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and hundreds of other technological privacy advocates.

CISPA, the bill that grants legal immunity to large information-collecting companies from being sued for sharing the personally identifying information of all their customers with the US government, has risen from the grave once again. The "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act" was introduced in the Senate by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). The language of this the third undead incarnation of the so-called "zombie bill" is as yet unclear.

This week you'll find that no greater defense against those that would have their evil way with the web can be found than the "Bat-Signal for the Interet" as teased by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. This fellow is one of several internet activists working together to protest web-containing bills such as SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA, three of the more famous bits of legislation to have popped up in Washington and abroad this past several months. To defend said internet, Ohanian and friends will be working in what they call the "Internet Defense League" with which they intend to be taken entirely seriously.

There's no way the bill currently going through Washington by the name of CISPA, just passed by the House of Representatives, will be allowed to be passed into law if the Obama administration's claim today holds true. CISPA can be metaphorically represented by a bar of soap created by government agencies claiming to open lines of communication between large internet companies with clean intent, but as you'll find if you read any of our past posts on CISPA you'll know - the main ingredient here is acid for privacy. The bill uses broad terms like Internet Security and the safety of children to push the abilities of the government to capture any information on web-browsing citizens they like, essentially whenever they like - and the White House this week is voicing opposition.

Luckily for denizens of the internet, SOPA was struck down not too long ago, but there’s another bill which was passed by the House of Representatives that proves just as menacing. It’s called CISPA, and was voted for 248 to 168. The bill would require private companies to hand over information they pertaining to you if requested by any government agency. That includes websites like Google, YouTube, and Facebook.

Just like SOPA, Facebook has responded to the growing concerns rising around an internet "security" bill presented to the House of Representatives this week - only this time they're taking the opposite stance. If you'll recall, SOPA (and its twin PIPA) were bills that allowed the US Government to effectively shut down any website it saw illegally sharing content - this set of bills was much too broad and were relatively quickly axed amid a giant bit of outcry on the part of the greater web. Now that CISPA has arrived, Facebook is seeing things differently.

In a relatively new bill being called "worse that SOPA," sponsored by congress member Mike Rogers, 28 corporate sponsors are bringing back the circumvention of basic Internet privacy laws in force. This bill can be found in PDF form here: [H.R. 3523] and includes a whole lot more sponsors than SOPA or its close relative PIPA had in the end before total destruction. This bill contains extremely vague wording which allows "extreme measures" to be inflicted upon sites from The Pirate Bay all the way up to the New York Times - if Homeland Security wants to shut a site like these down or asks for data regarding you or yours as you work with these sites, this bill says you must comply.

While the SOPA bill has been shelved, supporters are turning to internet providers to take measures against piracy instead. CNN reports that various North American ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, are set to introduce their own anti-piracy policies sooner rather than later.

Of the four major lobbying groups that Facebook has hired to lobby in Washington on its behalf, three have severed their ties with the social networking site. Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock; the Glover Park Group; and TeleMedia Policy Group have all walked away from the money Facebook was throwing their way to give the site a voice in Congress, citing "conflict" concerns, according to a recent Politico report.

This week the British High Court has ruled that The Pirate Bay website and its users have been and continue to engage in "large-scale copyright infringement", this very possibly leading to a requirement that UK internet providers ban the site outright soon. Should your website "actively promote copyright infringement" you may be facing the same fate in the near future as so-called piracy continues to be an issue throughout the western world amid crackdowns on sites such as Megaupload for uploading and sharing media illegally.

The recent controversy over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) legislation efforts have prompted an open letter beseeching Congress to halt its intellectual property lawmaking. The letter is signed by a coalition of 75 groups that includes not only internet companies such as Reddit and Mozilla but also human rights groups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and other communities.

One of the most recent leaders to sign the secretive and wide-spread internet censorship-minded Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has now apologized and called for mass demonstrations to protest what she's done. It's Slovenia's ambassador to Japan, miss Helena Drnovsek Zorko, who signed the ACTA and was immediately drown in emails and calls from Slovenians criticizing her for doing so. This bill was then read in full by the ambassador, she then deciding that the agrees fully with the critics who've mailed her, apologizing to her children and her country before calling for what's effectively a revolt against the agreement on the whole.